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Effizienz ist ein wichtiger Faktor der Usabilityforschung. Im Allgemeinen beschreibt die Effizienz eines Systems den Aufwand, welchen ein Nutzer erbringen muss, um eine bestimmte Aufgabe zu erfüllen. Effizienz wird meist in Zeit gemessen und evaluiert.

Die wissensbasierte Authentifizierung (bspw. PIN) stellt ein Beispiel für eine solche Aufgabe dar. Als Maß der Effizienz dient hier in der Regel die Zeit, welche für die korrekte Eingabe eines Passwortes/PIN benötigt wird. Neue Erkenntnisse deuten jedoch darauf hin, dass es neben der aktiven Eingabe weitere Phasen gibt, welche sowohl die gemessene als auch die gefühlte Effizienz des Mechanismus beeinflussen. Dabei ist neben der reinen Existenz dieser Phasen auch das Verhältnis der Phasen zueinander maßgebend für die User Experience.

In diesem Einzelpraktikum soll der Einfluss der verschiedenen Authentifizierungsphasen auf die Effizienz untersucht werden. Dafür sollen mehrere Modifikationen eines PIN-Eingabesystems entwickelt und im Feldtest studiert werden.

Aufgaben:

1. Literaturrecherche / selbstständiges Aneignen von Fachwissen
2. Ausarbeitung der zu testenden Konzepte (im Team)
3. Entwicklung der Studiensoftware (Android oder iOS)
4. Planung und Durchführung der Nutzerstudie (im Team)
5. Analyse und Aufbereitung der Studienergebnisse

Bei Erfolg des Projektes besteht die Möglichkeit an einer internationalen Publikation mitzuwirken.

Description

Virtual/Mixed Reality (VR) has been gaining popularity in the last years and we have seen that the future of these systems may have a very social factor to it. The most obvious social interaction may be in gaming, where multiple players can interact in the virtual world. However, collaboration and meetings in virtual reality may be another scenario that might even replace current tools such as videoconferencing.This project builds upon an ongoing one that looks into supporting interactions between a person in the virtual and the real world. The ongoing projects identifies designs and explores technical solutions for displaying real world user engagement in VR (i.e. someone enters the room, how can this be displayed to a person in VR?).

The goal of this project is to test methods for actively controlling user interactions. For example, once we have displayed in VR that a person has entered the room in the real world, how can the person in VR decide to engage with the person in the real world without taking the headset off.

Tasks

• Review of related work on privacy in virtual reality, gaze interaction and interaction in virtual reality and measuring HMD movements in VR
• Developing a prototype of a virtual reality environment that tests a number of designs for controlling user interactions (i.e. gaze, handheld controller)
• Implementing eye tracker data into VR
• Conducting an in-depth investigation of the potential and challenges of a virtual environment
• Analyze the data collected from the studies and build valid conclusions

Requirements

• Independent scientific work and creative problem solving
• Interest in performing user studies and experiments
• Interest in VR
• Good / Very good experience with c# 3D authoring tools (e.g.,Unity)

Das Konzept der unbewussten Wahrnehmung bekam vermutlich durch das Coca-Cola Experiment, welches durch Schleichwerbung in Kinofilmen angeblich einen höheren Verkauf erzielt hat, erstmalig öffentliches Interesse. Die unbewusste Wahrnehmung beschreibt eigentlich die Verarbeitung von visuellen Reizen, die für eine bewusste Verarbeitung zu schwach sind (z.B. zu kurz dargestellt). Damit können interessante Effekte wie Emotionen und Intuitionen hervorgerufen werden, die der Proband sich selbst nicht erklären kann. In dieser Einzelpraktikum wollen versuchen durch unbewusste Reize Sprachlernen zu unterstützen.

Aufgaben

• Literaturrecherche und -analyse
• Entwicklung einer Idee und Konzeption einer Nutzerstudie basierte auf den Birkenbihl Methode (https://www.birkenbihl-sprachen.com/pages/die-sprachlern-methode)
• Design und Realisierung eines Prototypen
• Durchführung und Analyse einer Nutzerstudie

Gewünschte Vorraussetzungen

• Gute Programmierkenntnisse
• Selbstständige Arbeitsweise mit einem hohen Maß an Engagement, Kreativität
• Selbstständiges wissenschaftliches Arbeiten mit Lernbereitschaft
• Interesse an neuartigen Anzeige- und Interaktionstechnologien

Description

Can we countersteer negative emotions in a car? Can we make the driver aware of their feelings in the car? We classify emotions using EEG and Heart Rate into positive and negative emotions. The goal of this project is to develop a concept for expressing emotions in the car using color changing LEDs on the dashboard and to conduct an extensive study to evaluate the effect of negative and positive emotions in the car. The study should be conducted in a lab driving-simulator (OpenDS) and the driving conditions should be as realistic as possible.

Description

A variety of modalities have been proposed for secure user authentication in the past but it still remains unclear how they compare in terms of usability and security.

The aim of this project is to compare several modalities for authentication on public displays.

Tasks

• Conducting a study of an already-implemented system
• Slightly adapting the system according to the outcome of the study
• Conducting a usability study and analyzing the data
• Conducting a security study and analyzing the data

Minimum requirements

• Previous experience in conducting user studies
• Basic knowledge in C#
• Previous experience with Eye Trackers and/or Kinect is a plus

Beschreibung

Heatmaps, Nutzer-Tracking, Interviews, Frageboegen. Mittlerweile haben sich verschiedene Methoden und Tools im User Experience (UX) Design Prozess etabliert. Eine besondere Herausforderung dabei ist es, geeignete Methoden fuer den jeweiligen Kontext auszuwaehlen und effiziente UX Messprozesse aufzubauen.

Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, basierend auf einer Recherche bestehender Tools und Methoden Vor- und Nachteile verschiedener Ansaetze herauszuarbeiten und Ableitungen fuer eine effiziente Kombination mehrerer Vorgehensweisen darzustellen. Dabei werden folgende Fragestellungen aufgearbeitet:

• Welche Rollen/Disziplinen muessen im UX (Mess-)Prozess beruecksichtigt werden?
• Welche Vor- und Nachteile ergeben sich aus der Nutzung qualitativer bzw. quantitativer UX Messmethoden?
• Wie koennen Verhaltensdaten (bzw. Beobachtungen, sogen. behavioural data) und einstellungsbezogene Daten (sogen. attitudinal data) genutzt und kombiniert werden?
• Wie koennen neue Technologien in der Praxis genutzt werden um den Prozess zu optimieren?

Aufgaben

• Ausfuehrliche Literaturrecherche zu UX Mess- und Designmethoden
• Beispielhafte Implementierung ausgewaehlter Tools
• Empirische Studie zur Verwendung verschiedener UX Tools im Design Prozess
• Reflexion und kritische Betrachtung der Ergebnisse inklusive Ausblick und Vision

Anforderungen

• Eigenstaendige Arbeitsweise und Interesse an wissenschaftlichem Arbeiten
• Erste Praxiserfahrung im Bereich UX Design, Usability Engineering, Interaktion Design, User Research oder vergleichbaren Fachbereichen
• Interesse am Thema UX
• Grundlegende Programmierkenntnisse

Die Arbeit wird in Kooperation mit klarx GmbH (https://www.klarx.de/) bearbeitet und kann mit einer Werkstudentenstelle kombiniert werden.

Bei Interesse melde dich bitte per E-Mail (inkl. CV und Transcript) bei mir, Florian Lachner.

While wearing a head mounted display in a collaborative task between a person acting in the real world and a person acting in the virtual world, the visual connection between the HMD user and the real world user is disrupted. But visual connection between two collaborators is important for at least five distinct communicative functions: regulating conversation flow, providing feedback, communicating emotional information, communicating the nature of interpersonal relationships and avoiding distraction by restricting visual input [1,2]. This work will focus on the aspect of providing feedback in a collaborative task. As real world studies show, the availability of eye gaze increase collaboration speed significantly. Also there is some work, that shows that this finding holds for virtual avatars [4], but there seams to be no added value by presenting a stereoscopic representation of the eyes [4]. Therefore the task for this work is to evaluate, if a display mounted on the front of a HMD will enhance the collaboration performance. Possible tasks to test this might be a selection task, at which the instructor wearing the HMD will speak out which object needs to be taken assisted by the eye gaze presented of the front of the HMD. Also it might be a possibility to directly measure the accuracy generated by the eye gaze as in [4]. The study will have a wizard of Oz design, as the eye movements will be precalculated. Therefore the technical implementation in this study will be to mount a display onto a HMD in a defined way and calibrate the displayed eye gaze on real world coordinates, based on the coordinates given by the head tracking system. The variables to be examined will be the kind of eye representation on the screen. 1. Real World Eyes, 2. Eyes on Display not moving/ head gaze to target, 3. Eyes on Display gazing at target/ no head movement 4. Eyes on Display gazing at target/ head movement.

[1]Argyle, M., Bodily Communication. Methuen & Co., London, 1975.
[2]Kendon, A. Some Functions of Gaze-Direction in Social Interaction. Acta Psychologica, 26 (1967), 22- 63.
[3]Sascha Fagel, Gérard Bailly, Frédéric Elisei, and Amélie Lelong. 2010. On the importance of eye gaze in a face-to-face collaborative task. In Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Affective interaction in natural environments (AFFINE '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 81-86. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1877826.1877847
[4]Norman Murray, Dave Roberts, Anthony Steed, Paul Sharkey, Paul Dickerson, and John Rae. 2007. An assessment of eye-gaze potential within immersive virtual environments. ACM Trans. Multimedia Comput. Commun. Appl. 3, 4, Article 8 (December 2007)

Aufgaben:

• Literaturrecherche verwandter Arbeiten
• Methodische Gliederung des Prozeßes
• Versuchsaufbau (Basierend auf Unity 5, HMD, Android)
• Versuchsdesign, Durchführung und Auswertung einer Probandenstudie zur Beantwortung der Forschungsfrage

Ihre Kompetenzen:

• Studium im Bereich Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion, Medientechnik, Informatik
• Interesse an selbstständigem wissenschaftlichem Arbeiten
• Erfahrung in Planung, Durchführung und statistischer Auswertung von Probandenstudien
• Grundlage in Unity (C#) und 3D-Modellierung

If two people in one room (collocated) have to work together and one of them wears a head mounted display (HMD) like the Oculus Rift, they will experience the so called presence disparity. This border influences many aspect of collaboration like social awareness or deixis. One solution of overcoming breaks in the work flow of the participants is to augment the virtual world to let the virtual participant see his real world (RW) collaborator [1]. In our setup the RW and the HMD collaborator will meet at a multi touch tabletop display in order to collaborate. The Kinect (or similar RGB-D Sensor) will be above the Table in order to track the peoples movement. The VR user will see the hands of everybody reaching over the table, which might help to compensate the limitations in mutual awareness. Further the VR user will be able to see his own hands, when reaching over the table, what wil help him in the interaction with others. In this work you need to setup the tracking device (e.g. Kinect) above a touchtable. Further you need to integrate the point cloud rendering into Unity 5.x based on the tracking data of the tracking device, by the use of http://pointclouds.org/ or similar libraries. In the first user study you will have to assess the tracking accuracy of the system, when the virtual user is interacting with the touchsurface. Based on the results you will setup an experiment, that enables the users to collaborate in a puzzle task to asses the performance of the system compared to a real world baseline.
[1]Tang, A., Boyle, M. and Greenberg, S. (2005). Display and Presence Disparity in Mixed Presence Groupware. Journal of Research and Practice in Information Technology, Vol. 37, No. 2, May, p71-88.)

Aufgaben:

• Literaturrecherche verwandter Arbeiten
• Methodische Gliederung des Prozeßes
• Versuchsaufbau (Basierend auf Unity 5, HMD, Multi-Touch Tisch)
• Versuchsdesign, Durchführung und Auswertung einer Probandenstudie zur Beantwortung der Forschungsfrage

Ihre Kompetenzen:

• Studium im Bereich Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion, Medientechnik, Informatik
• Intereße an selbstständigem wißenschaftlichem Arbeiten
• Erfahrung in Planung, Durchführung und statistischer Auswertung von Probandenstudien
• Grundlage in Unity (C#) und 3D-Modellierung

In order to develop, test or present simulated car functionalities without having a real car prototype, one needs to have an environment to drive in. However creating these environments is based on experts software, but the people interested in exploring the car functions are no experts in using those tools. What these people enjoy to do is to explore the possibilities of a car function in different environments they choose for themselves. As shown by the ideas of the google chrome racer ([1],[2]) a fun an collaborative way of creating those environments is to connect several private devices together to generate a big collaborative environment. The task is to elaborate about a framework, that enables several users to generate a street network in a collaborative manner, which will be rendered in Unity 5.x. The layout is defined by the ordering of sketches they made on their smartphones and then connecting this sketch to a road network. Further the users need to be enabled to add other environmental elements by sketching them on their Smartphone and adding them to a certain coordinate of the generated street network. A user study should show the advantages and disadvantages of the system in terms of promoting collaboration, usability, complexity of the results and ease of use in comparison to a pen and paper creation process.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOCM9_qGccY
[2]https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/casestudies/racer/

Aufgaben:

• Literaturrecherche verwandter Arbeiten
<<<<<<< .mine
• Methodische Gliederung des Prozeßes
• Versuchsaufbau (Basierend auf Unity 5, HMD, Multi-Touch Tisch)
• Methodische Gliederung des Prozeßes zum Wechsel der Position
• Versuchsaufbau (Basierend auf Unity 5/ Unreal, HMD, Multi-Touch Tisch)
=======
• Methodische Gliederung des Prozeßes zum Wechsel der Position
• Versuchsaufbau (Unity 5, Android, Surface Touch etc.)
• Versuchsdesign, Durchführung und Auswertung einer Probandenstudie zur Beantwortung der Forschungsfrage

Ihre Kompetenzen:

• Studium im Bereich Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion, Medientechnik, Informatik
• Interesse an selbstständigem wissenschaftlichem Arbeiten
• Erfahrung in Planung, Durchführung und statistischer Auswertung von Probandenstudien
• Grundlage in Unity (C#) und 3D-Modellierung

The mounting of a leap motion to a head mounted display lets the user experience is own hands in a virtual environment. The tracking of the hand is very accurate, but there are always calibration mismatches between the users head position and the representation of his virtual hands. For example, if the users stands straight and is looking straight ahead onto the tracked, virtual hand in front of him. Then the real hand might be shifted slightly to the left or to the right. This error gets even bigger when the user keeps the hand in front of him and moves his head from left to right. This gets a problem, when the user wants to touch a virtual object, that has a real world representation. Then the users sees his hand touching the virtual object, but because of the shift he might miss to touch the real object. This work will focus on the calibration of the Leap Motion coordinate system to the HMD coordinate system based on the input of the touch surface. The calibration procedure will be based on the work of prior work. Your task is to implement the calibration procedure in Unity 5.x and evaluate the resulting accuracy of the system in an user study.

Aufgaben:

• Literaturrecherche verwandter Arbeiten
• Methodische Gliederung des Prozeßes
• Versuchsaufbau (Basierend auf Unity 5, HMD, Multi-Touch Tisch, Leap Motion)
• Versuchsdesign, Durchführung und Auswertung einer Probandenstudie zur Beantwortung der Forschungsfrage

Ihre Kompetenzen:

• Studium im Bereich Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion, Medientechnik, Informatik
• Interesse an selbstständigem wissenschaftlichem Arbeiten
• Erfahrung in Planung, Durchführung und statistischer Auswertung von Probandenstudien
• Grundlage in Unity (C#) und 3D-Modellierung

Description

The design and evaluation of digital learning tools for preschoolers have unique requirements. For example, young children’s cognitive development dictates what they are capable of understanding and how they can interact with technologies. When designing for learning, learner’s goals, needs, activities and educational contexts must be additionally considered. Finally, when evaluating technologies with preschoolers, it must be noted that children can be shy, vary in their talkativeness, be biased in their responses to adults (wanting to please), have limited concentration, or have difficulty expressing themselves, all of which can influence usability testing outcomes.

This project aims to iteratively design and implement a digital learning tool for four- to six-year old children. The content of the tool will be based on the Control of Variables Strategy (CVS), which is foundational for school science and scientific literacy, but it does not routinely develop without practice or instruction. CVS is a strategy used to determine the effect of a particular variable; to manipulate that variable, but keep everything else the same (vary one thing at a time; VOTAT). As a result, one can distinguish between confounded and unconfounded experiments and draw valid inferences from experiments.

The project is a collaboration between the REASON Doctoral program at the Department of Psychology (LMU) and the Media Informatics Group (LMU). Usability testing of the tool will be conducted with children at local kindergartens.

Tasks

• Comprehensive survey of related work on interaction design for young children and existing products.
• Additional brief overview of cognitive development and scientific reasoning (specifically control of variables strategy).
• Design an interactive learning tool for preschool age children (4-6 years old) similar in concept to TED Tutor (see suggested readings below).
• Implement an Android/iOS/web app to run the learning tool on a tablet.
• Conduct (iterative) usability testing of the tool with children at kindergartens to refine design and implementation.
• Analyze the data collected from the studies and build valid conclusions.

Requirements

• Interest in an interdisciplinary study with a strong emphasis on technologies for learning sciences.
• Solid programming skills in a language/toolkit suitable for the implementation of a mobile app optimized to run on a tablet.
• Interest in designing a user interface for young children and refining it through usability testing.

Suggested Reading:

• Chen, Z., & Klahr, D. (1999). All other things being equal: acquisition and transfer of the control of variables strategy. Child Development, 70(5), 1098–1120.
• Gelderblom, H., & Kotze, P. (2008, October). Designing Technology for Young Children: What we can Learn from Theories of Cognitive Development. In Proceedings of the 2008 annual research conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists on IT research in developing countries: riding the wave of technology (pp. 66-75). ACM.
• Klahr, D. TED Tutor - Training in Experimental Design. see http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~tedtutor/index.html